This critical edition of the biggest box-office hit of seventeenth-century France finally makes the text of the play available more easily to students and scholars The text will be of interest to anyone studying seventeenth-century French theatre or the court of Louis XIV and attitudes towards witchcraft. The introduction grounds the play in its historical context on which its extraordinary success depended, and analyses the play from a number of points of view, notably the structure and function of comedy, attitudes towards the occult, and issues related to sex and gender.

This book explores the fascinating phenomenon of cross-casting and related gender issues in different theatrical genres and different performance contexts during the heyday of French theatre. Although professional acting troupes under Louis XIV were mixed, cross-casting remained an important feature of French court ballet (in which the King himself performed a number of women's roles) and an occasional feature of spoken comedy and tragic opera. Cross-casting also persisted out of necessity in the school drama of the period. This book fills an important gap in the history of French theatre and...

In 1664, Moliere's Tartuffe was banned from public performance. This book provides a detailed, in-depth account of five-year struggle (1664-69) to have the ban lifted and, so doing, sheds important new light on 1660s France and the ancien regime more broadly.